Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Ray Ozzie spoke last Thursday at the Churchill Club in Palo Alto, at a discussion moderated by Steven Levy of Wired magazine. His topic was the transformational role of cloud computing in the future of technology.
During the question and answer segment, Ozzie was asked for his view of Google Wave, the impending technology from Google which seeks to unify e-mail and instant messaging as well as other forms of online collaboration.
It is “anti-web” he replied. Ozzie did praise Google for taking on such a task as reinventing the whole concept of the most ubiquitous Internet application ever – e-mail.
Yet, to Ozzie, Wave violated the fundamental principles of the Web. In a response which made me check he still worked for Microsoft, Ozzie asserted the Web is all about open data formats and open protocols, and about technologies that are simple enough for people to implement themselves.
This response is a surprising one, given the Microsoft legacy of proprietary standards and even the flaunting of standards within Internet Explorer, let alone that Google have declared Wave will be released as an open protocol in the hope others will develop their own Wave-compliant products.
You might ask yourself what Ozzie would consider a good Internet-friendly product. In two words, “Live Mesh.”
Ozzie continued his response by explaining Live Mesh has been built on top of the lessons learned from Groove (although Dave Cutler may not agree; previously his team explained Live Mesh had benefited from Microsoft’s experiences with MSN and Hotmail and it was these products that gave the company its in-house skills to produce Azure.)
According to Ozzie, Live Mesh is web friendly and it is simple enough for people to implement into their own solutions.
Whether this is true or not, the comparison is somewhat bizarre because it is akin to comparing e-mail with file transfer.
One cannot help but feel Ozzie would have liked to be the one heralding Google Wave. Really, his work has focused on collaboration for over 20 years. If any “big name” was going to be solving the problem of a brand new e-mail standard for the 21st century you would reasonably expect Ozzie to be on the short-list.
Yet, while Lotus Notes is the subject of many a hate site, and while Groove languishes in obscurity, Google are making a strong name for themselves as true innovators, unafraid to challenge the past by architecting the future.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
